First To Fight (The Empire's Corps Book 11) (14 page)

He wasn't kidding.  We jumped four more times, each time using a different model of parachute.  I rapidly learned the difference between army-issue and marine-issue, although it wasn't until Nordstrom explained it to us after our landing that I understood just what I was seeing.  An army parachutist using an automatic parachute would often have it deploy too soon, slowing his fall and exposing him to enemy fire from the ground; a marine would fall like a rock until the last possible moment, whereupon he would pull the cord and deploy his parachute.  It was safer, in the sense the enemy would have less time to take aim, but dangerous, if the cord wasn't pulled in time.  A parachutist might slam into the ground before slowing his fall and die ...

That was how we lost Ace.

I hadn't known him well, not really.  He was one of the shining stars of Squad One; a recruit from a background that actually prepared him rather well for the marines.  I certainly don’t think he showed any hesitation when jumping out for the first time; even Viper, our snake in the grass, had managed to leap from the plane.  And I have no idea just why he failed to deploy his parachute in time.  All I know is that he hit the ground at terrifying speed and died.

We saw his body, afterwards.  It looked surprisingly intact - most of us had seen plenty of violence, physical or sexual, on the flicks - but it was dead.  Ace had been handsome, I supposed; now, he was just a broken sack of bones.  It took time for us to realise that this could have happened to
any
of us, that our training wasn’t completely safe, that we could die before we graduated and saw the enemy.  Like so much else, we knew it and yet we didn't quite believe.  We were a sombre group of recruits that night, completely subdued.  Even Viper looked pale and wan before Lights Out.

There was a small ceremony for him the following evening, after we had completed our daily exercises and training schedule.  All of the training platoons gathered in the great hall and listened, silently, as Bainbridge spoke about Ace.  I hadn't known he’d been born to a family on Shaddock, or that life there was so hard that the planet’s major export was
people
, or that Ace had had four parents and seven siblings.  It sounded like a happy group marriage to me, one designed to provide a safety net for children who could lose their biological parents at any moment.  He had had something I’d lacked until I joined the marines ...

... And yet, when he’d started to look for a career, he’d chosen to join too.

“We do our best to eliminate accidents, but there is always a certain level of risk,” Bainbridge said, after he had finished the brief eulogy.  Ace had asked that his body be shipped home, if he died during training, and the corps would honour his request.  “You should all understand, now at least, just how dangerous this can be.  Training will go on, of course, if you wish to continue.  If not, speak to one of us and we will see to your separation from the corps.”

I understood what we were being told, even if Bainbridge didn't say it outright.  If we thought it was suddenly too dangerous to proceed, we could quit.  The corps didn't want to keep anyone against their will, not when it needed men who would never quit.  I could have left ...

... But I didn't.

Life was cheap in the Undercity, before the end; I’d known children who had died before reaching their teens and adults who had been casually murdered by the gangs.  My own family had been killed in a spasm of gang violence.  And yet, Ace’s death affected me more than any of those.  Perhaps it was because he had been trying, unlike so many others, to become part of something greater than himself, or perhaps it was because he’d had true promise, promise that had been smashed along with his life.  I mourned him as well as I could, then carried on.  It was all I could do.

I never learned to love parachute jumps, not even after completing hundreds of them as part of basic training.  But I learned to endure, to continue despite my fear ...

... And not, whatever happened, to allow fear to slow me down.

Chapter Fourteen

The downside of ‘realistic’ military training is the prospect of an accidental death - or several, if something goes badly wrong.  Marine recruits have suffered a number of ghastly fates, ranging from drowning to depressurisation, but the corps has gone on.  Safety is important, it insists, yet realism is also important.  The Civil Guard safety record, during basic training, is far more impressive ... a fact that only looks good when seen in isolation.  On deployment, marines - quite simply - do far better than anyone else.

-Professor Leo Caesius

They worked us hard for days after the accident.

I think they wanted to keep us from having time to brood and they were probably right.  Ace had been a good recruit, one of the best.  His death proved that
anyone
could die in training.  We shot off thousands of rounds, marched hundreds of miles, beat the crap out of the younger platoon (and had the crap beaten out of us by the older platoons) and generally did our best to get over any lingering trauma caused by the death.  By the time we were marched into the doctor’s office for another round of injections, two more of us had quit and the rest were feeling pushed to their limits.

“You will be pleased to know that higher authority has deemed you worthy of more investment,” Bainbridge said, as we rubbed our arms after the injections.  “It will take several weeks for it to bed in, but you are now capable of eating a wide range of foodstuffs without suffering any ill effects.  You will be able to eat grass, if necessary, while you are on deployment.  It does have its limits, of course, but it makes it easier to support a marine detachment on the far side of the Empire.”

He went on about it in great and tedious detail.  As I understood it at the time, there were plants that simply couldn't be eaten without ill effects, even if they did include some of the vital necessities of life.  The injections would suppress the bad reactions, allowing us to eat them.  They did have the great disadvantage of forcing our bodies to expel anything completely useless faster than normal, something that might be inconvenient in a combat zone, but I've yet to discover anything that didn't have disadvantages, no matter what the eggheads said.

“So basically we’re always going to swallow instead of spit,” Joker muttered.

“Shut up,” I muttered back.

I wasn't quiet enough.  Bainbridge, as I may have mentioned, had abnormally sharp ears.

“Are you interrupting me?”  He asked, in a polite tone that sent chills down our spines.  “Is there something more important than my words exciting you?”

“No, sir,” we said, hastily.

“Drop and give me fifty,” he ordered, then continued as we dropped to the ground.  “There
will
be some adverse effects from these injections, so you will spend the next couple of days on light duty.  The time will not be wasted, however.  You will attend the first lecture from a guest professor this evening.”

He was right, unfortunately.  Most of us, including me, spent the day retching, although none of us actually threw up. 
Light
duties consisted of more training and exercises than we’d done during Hell Week - it says a lot about how far we’d come that we took it in our stride - while they watched us carefully for more serious reactions.  Joker had the worst of it, I think; he stumbled to his knees in the middle of a training run, dry-retching until I thought he was going to be genuinely sick.  I helped him to his feet and ran with him until we reached the finishing line; oddly, none of the Drill Instructors berated us for coming in last.  They must have been more worried than they let on.

That evening, after chow, we were herded into the briefing hall and told to sit down and relax.  I couldn't help feeling as if I were going back to school, although I think I would have learned a great deal more if school had been run like Boot Camp.  It probably couldn't have been, though.  Recruits like us selected ourselves; we were in Boot Camp because we
wanted
to be in Boot Camp.  Historically, conscript armies haven't had the motivation or training of volunteer armies and I saw no reason why it would be different for us.  Marine training, as elaborate as it is, can only work when someone willingly places themselves into Boot Camp and submits to the Drill Instructors.  I could have quit at any moment ...

... But I couldn't quit school.

Professor Sidney Baldwin struck me, at the time, as an odd duck.  It wasn't until much later that I learned he was a typical marine academic.  Marines are thinkers -
that
had been hammered into our heads time and time again - and perhaps it wasn't too surprising that some of us went back to the academic world to earn degrees.  It was rare for a marine, serving or retired, to go to one of the big universities, but there
was
a War College on the Slaughterhouse and several smaller universities where freedom of thought was considered more than lip service to an unattainable ideal.  I hadn’t heard anything good about university in the Undercity, yet the War College sounded like fun.  But I never had a chance to go.

“This is not a test,” Baldwin said.  Unlike the teachers at school, he didn't have to shout - or beg - for silence.  None of us would have dared pass notes, throw paper aeroplanes or bully our comrades anywhere near the Drill Instructors.  And even if they hadn't been seated in the back, we wouldn't have done it anyway.  “You can go to sleep, if you like, and I won’t care.”

Hah
, I thought. 
Baldwin
might not have cared, but the Drill Instructors certainly would.  And besides, I doubted they’d be wasting our time.  What Baldwin told us would probably relate to some aspect of our training, perhaps something just far enough away to give us an opportunity to forget before we needed it.  I was starting to learn how they operated by now.

“Tonight, I’m going to talk about
trust
,” Baldwin continued.  “Who do you trust?”

He smiled at us all, then went on.  “Trust is the glue that binds society together,” he said, briskly.  “If you are able to trust someone to keep their word, you can rely on them; if you can’t, you
cannot
rely on them.  By now, I believe most of you will have learned that you have to rely on your comrades to get through Boot Camp.  Can you
trust
them?”

I nodded, slowly.  I didn't trust Viper, but I trusted the others.  Two months of intensive training had broken down the barriers between us as we were forced to work together.  Some of the tests were simply impossible to pass unless we worked together.

“A cynic might assert that trust is based on being able to
get
someone for
breaking
trust,” Baldwin continued.  “It would be more accurate to say that trust is based on reputation.  A person who breaks trust, for whatever reason, is unlikely to be trusted in future.  This is so true that a person who might have a good
reason
to break trust is still going to be tainted.”

He took a breath.  “In early human societies, trust only really existed between families.  It was possible to trust your parents, or your siblings, but not someone outside them.  Later, as societies became more sophisticated, trust extended to one’s social group.  It became possible to trust someone who shared your race, or religion, yet not someone who didn’t.  This happened because the group tended to exclude or punish anyone who broke trust.

“You will discover, if you graduate, that that applies to us too.  A marine is far more trustworthy, you will believe, than anyone else.”

I frowned.  No one in their right mind trusted
anyone
in the Undercity, not even their own family.  I’d known that Trevor would happily sell out the rest of us, if it made him wealthy and powerful.  Others had sold their siblings to the gangs, or preyed on their schoolmates, or raped and murdered their partners.  To put your life in someone else’s hands was asking for trouble.  But I’d learned differently at Boot Camp.

“The development of certain human societies reflected the development of trust,” Baldwin said.  “Societies that managed to forge trusted links became wealthy and powerful; societies that didn’t, for whatever reason, tended to stagnate.  For example, aristocrats were willing to make and honour promises to other aristocrats, but not to honour promises made to those they considered their inferiors.  By breaking those promises, often made for tactical advantage, they proved
themselves
to be untrustworthy, which undermined the very basis of their society and eventually led to their destruction.  The true test of a society lay in how it would handle the issue of trust between different groups.  This eventually led to the development of contract law and neutral courts.”

He smiled, rather humourlessly.  “A contract, at base, is an agreement between two people,” he continued.  “I could sign a contract with you to provide a service, in exchange for payment, and - on that level - there would be very little difference between a written contract and a verbal agreement.  The importance of contact law, however, lies in the fact that there would be an enforcement mechanism.  Should I fail to uphold my side of the contract, you could take me to court.

“It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this development.  Historically, humans tended to support their own tribe, even when their comrade was clearly in the wrong.  An outsider could be cheated at will, which placed limits on just how far trust - and hence society - could spread.  The development of legal courts that looked at contracts - and only the contracts, instead of other factors - allowed trust to expand beyond a given group.  It was this trust that allowed for the development of far more complicated - and enduring - societies.”

I had a feeling he was right, although it was hard to put it into words.  There hadn't been anything
permanent
in the Undercity.  The gangs were held together by the strongest, who lost their positions when they were challenged and beaten by their rivals.  Nor did anyone place any faith in the courts, or schools, or doctors ... there had been no trust.  And who in their right mind would have trusted
anyone
?  It was always wise to keep one eye on the door, just in case it might be time to make a run for it.

“So you might ask,” Baldwin said, “why is society so fucked up today?”

There were some chuckles.  He waited for us to finish, then went on.

“It didn't take long for the new system of contract law - the system that binds the Empire together - to get undermined,” he warned.  “A very basic contract, like the one I suggested earlier, might be no more than a single page.  However, a contract detailing something vastly more complex might run to hundreds of pages, which no human could hope to read, let alone comprehend.  There might even be a section that completely invalidated the rest of the contract, or insisted on one party meeting impossible conditions to cancel the contract, or even honest confusion about the measuring system.  I have seen legal cases where one party clung to a single section of the contract, while the other pointed to a different section or started arguing about the precise meaning of several words.

“Furthermore, the courts themselves tended to become undermined.  Money talked.  So did political influence.  Right now, contracts between colony worlds and interstellar corporations tend to have a clause stipulating that any disputes between the two parties have to be settled in the Galactic Supreme Court, which is based on Earth.  The corporations, which have a vast amount of influence on Earth, are therefore able to influence the Galactic Supreme Court to rule in their favour.  And, as these rulings give a legal basis for military intervention if necessary, the decisions are often enforced.  It isn't unknown for a corporation to deliberately provoke an incident just so they can get military support.”

He peered down at us for a long moment.  “It is no exaggeration to suggest that there is no trust in the Empire today,” he stated, bluntly.  “And many of the problems you will have to deal with come from that lack of trust.

“No one in their right mind would expect the Galactic Supreme Court to rule in favour of a colony world, when that colony world is facing a major corporation.  Nor would anyone expect the Grand Senate to do anything about the situation.  A corporation can even convince the Grand Senate, the source of all authority and power within the Empire, to make a ruling that places legal authority over a colony world into the hands of a corporation, if there is the tiniest of fig leaves to justify it.  And then they act all surprised when the colonists rebel, when they decide they would prefer to fight rather than bend over for the corporations.”